Unscheduled military drills in Russian Far East

July 15 2013

Viktor Litovkin

specially for RIR

Sudden alerts for troops are the most effective way of testing the real and not declared combat readiness, the commanders’ ability to control their units and solve combat tasks that crop up. Source: RIA Novosti

More than 80,000 personnel, about 1,000 tanks and armoured vehicles, 130 long-range, fighter, bombing and army planes and helicopters, as well as 70 naval ships and vessels, take part in drill.

This means that all leave for officers, NCOs and other
members of the Armed Forces under contract has been cancelled and conscripted
soldiers and sergeants are not allowed furlough to go to town. Ammunition has
been put into tanks, armoured vehicles, self-propelled guns, anti-aircraft
missiles and tactical missile launchers. All this hardware, along with the
personnel, has been moved out of military parks to areas of concentration,
proving and shooting ranges, have taken their assigned positions, camouflaged
themselves and, with engines turned off, are waiting for further orders.
Fighters and bombers have left their airfields and are waiting for further
orders at standby airfields. Pacific Fleet ships have put to sea.

The Eastern Military District is several times the size of
France, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Pacific and from the North Korean
border to the Arctic Ocean.

The Russian Defence Ministry press service has announced that
more than 80,000 personnel, about 1,000 tanks and armoured vehicles, 130
long-range, fighter, bombing and army planes and helicopters, as well as 70
naval ships and vessels, are involved. They have all been put on alert on the
orders of Supreme Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin, who, during a
visit to Kursk the day before, ordered Russia’s Defence Minister Army General
Shoigu to conduct a challenge inspection of the Eastern Military District.
Similar inspections of the Western, Southern and Central Military Districts
have already been carried out.

Some of the district’s units will be moved by air, rail and
sea over a distance of 3,000 kilometres, while the enemy will be played by the
units of the Central Military District (its area stretches from the Volga River
to Lake Baikal), specifically by the Novosibirsk Combined Arms army, with
attached fighter and bombing aviation. The inspection will also involve
manoeuvres by Pacific Fleet surface ships and submarines, marines and other
troops.

The challenge
inspections are not connected with any real military threat to Russia. Indeed,
it has been officially stated that they are not aimed against any other
country. It has nothing to do, as some might think, with US citizen Edward
Snowden marooned in the Sheremetyevo airport transit area, who had earlier
asked for political asylum in Russia. Russia is not going to fight anyone and
is not threatening anyone or showing its military muscle: those who are
supposed to know in the neighbouring countries and even on the other side of
the world are well aware of this. Sudden alerts for troops in a military district
or arm of the service are the most effective way of testing the real and not
declared combat readiness, the commanders’ ability to control their units and
solve combat tasks that crop up.

For example, the surprise inspection of the Central Military
District and some Airborne Troops units in February on the order of the Defence
Minister – for the first time in the last twenty-odd years – revealed that some
units were unable to deploy their fighting vehicles because some of them,
notably those recently repaired at defence industry enterprises, got stuck
halfway. Some units did not even receive the alarm signal from Moscow because
the officers on duty slept through it. The phone call from the Russian capital
to the 201st military base stationed in Tajikistan never came through. It
turned out that telephone communications with the Russian base were organised
through the Republic’s Communications Ministry, which was not overly concerned
about its stability and accuracy. All these drawbacks had to be urgently remedied.
The chances are nobody would have been aware of them had it not been for the
unscheduled combat readiness check initiated by Minister Shoigu.

Source: Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation / mil.ru

The inspection of the
Southern Military District also revealed shortcomings in the way communications
and control were organised, as the President noted during his meeting with the
Defence Minister. Similar derelictions were found during the inspection of the
Western Military Districts. They, too, are being rectified.

That is not to say that all the shortcomings of the military
reform will be eliminated by means of unscheduled inspections alone. Far from
it. Modernisation and building of the Armed Forces is proceeding in line with a
detailed plan up to the year 2020, as witnessed by the plan for developing the
army and navy for the coming ten years recently published on the Internet.

But plans are just plans, even if their implementation can be
monitored on-line. The real combat readiness of the troops is checked if not in
war, then certainly in the field, at sea or in the sky during exercises and
manoeuvres. This year has seen a fair number of them and will see many more.
The military say 1700 checks of combat readiness are to be carried out. The
alert in the Eastern Military District is just one of them.

Related:

There will also be a major operational-strategic exercise,
West-2013, in Russia and Belarus in September, launches of strategic land and
sea missiles (the Sevmash shipyard is to deliver to the Russian Navy two
missile-carrying Borei-class Project 955 strategic submarine cruisers, each
carrying 16 Bulava strategic missiles). Long-range aviation will fly across the
Atlantic and the Pacific and all four fleets will approach the Mediterranean,
the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

To repeat, all this is being done not to intimidate anyone
(incidentally, NATO regularly conducts troop manoeuvres near the Russian
border) but solely to upgrade the skills of Russian officers and military staff
in controlling the troops, to hone the skills of tankmen, artillery men, infantry,
airmen, seamen, the Aerospace Defence troops and operators of various combat
systems. The army of any country must be ready at any time to repel an attack
by any aggressor. To be able to do that, it must be in constant training, like
a football team. This will be the task over the next week of the Eastern
Military District troops and the Pacific Fleet under its command.